I’ve been awarded a technology integration grant for 2014-15, and I’ll be using it to redesign my Wikipedia course. Wikipedia is constantly being edited: you can see a real-time world map of edits, or even listen to an audio version. Because the site changes so fast, no list of coverage could ever be complete. If you know of an interesting article about Wikipedia that you think should be covered here, please let me know in the comments!

Note, August 20 2014: I’ve relocated this information to our course website, and won’t update this page further. But I’m still very interested if you have recommendations for articles to cover.

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Overview

I’ve grouped articles by year, in reverse chronological order. I’ve limited myself to articles about Wikipedia, though the site is also a wealth of information about itself, in surprising ways (it lists hoaxes, for example, and engages in some self-criticism.)

In my view, the top five must-reads are:

Maria Bustillos “Wikipedia and the Death of the Expert” (The Awl, 2011). Bustillos looks at Wikipedia through the lens of Marshall McLuhan, and argues that the site reflects a shift in how we think about knowledge and expertise.

Stacy Schiff, “Know it All“(New Yorker, 2006). Celebrating Wikipedia’s one-millionth article, Schiff’s insightful description of the site focuses on founder Jimmy Wales and explores the oddity of anonymous editors, leading to the “Essjay controversy.”

Nicholson Baker, “The Charms of Wikipedia” (New York Review of Books, 2008) is ostensibly a review of Broughton’s manual on using Wikipedia, but quickly digresses into an entertaining discussion of vandalism and page deletion.

New York Times writer Noam Cohen writes about the site whenever it makes the news in an interesting way, and I’ve grouped together his articles for each year. And though I have listed only a couple articles from Wikipediocracy, the site claiming “to shine the light of scrutiny into the dark crevices of Wikipedia and its related projects,” the articles there are often very good.

Though there are numerous academic studies of Wikipedia, I’ve mostly limited this list to popular-press articles. The choice is governed partly by my teaching: my students create and evaluate a list of peer-reviewed articles, and having them all in one place defeats part of the purpose.

2014

Gregory Kohs, “Google’s Knowledge Graph Boxes: killing Wikipedia?” (Wikipediocracy, January 2014). Kohs looks at a new feature of Google that means less traffic is directed to Wikipedia. The comments section contains an interesting conversation about what this might mean for the two websites (see below for more theories about their connection)

Andreas Kolbe, “Why do people contribute to Wikipedia?” (Wikipediocracy, March 2014). Kolbe offers a more interesting and detailed answer to this question than Jimmy Wales’s trite “because it’s awesome.”

Nigel Scott, “Wikipedia: where truth goes to die.” (Spiked, April 2014). Scott rehashes some of the major criticisms of Wikipedia, focusing on its susceptibility to vandalism and manipulation and its Byzantine system for editing and resolving disputes.

Meghan Duffy, “Using Wikipedia in the classroom: a cautionary tale.” (Dynamic Ecology, May 2014)) A professor at the University of Michigan, Duffy shares her experience with a Wikipedia assignment, in which her student was bullied by Wikipedia editors. At this point such assignments are sufficiently common that several other instructors responded to share their own experiences.

Adrianne Wadewitz, “Wikipedia is pushing the boundaries of scholarly practice but the gender gap must be addressed” (HASTAC, April 2013). Adrianne Wadewitz, who passed away in 2014, was among the leaders in bringing Wikipedia into the college classroom. An active Wikipedian herself, she worked hard to fight the site’s inherent gender biases.

2012

James Gleick, The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood (2012). Contains a great chapter on Wikipedia.

Timothy Messer-Kruse, “The ‘Undue Weight’ of Truth on Wikipedia” (The Chronicle of Higher Education, February 2012). Despite having written two books and several articles on the Haymarket Riots, Messer-Kruse found himself blocked from editing the entry.

Philip Roth, “An Open Letter to Wikipedia,” (New Yorker, September 2012). Unable to change his own Wikipedia entry, Roth found himself publishing this letter so that a basic fact about himself was part of the public record, and therefore verifiable in Wikipedia.

2011

Maria Bustillos, “Wikipedia and the Death of the Expert” (The Awl, May 2011). Joining the chorus of articles about Marshal McLuhan in the centennial year of his birth, Bustillos links the Canadian philosopher’s ideas to the online encyclopedia.

2005

Jimmy Wales, “The Intelligence of Wikipedia” (webcast, Oxford Internet Institute, July 2005). One of the many presentations Wales has given about the site he founded, and for which he remains the figurehead.

John Seigenthaler, “A False Wikipedia ‘Biography,’” (USA Today, November 2005). An early and landmark example of Wikipedia’s negative effect on a living person.

“Internet Encyclopedias Go Head to Head” (Nature, December 2005; behind a paywall). This study found Wikipedia comparable to Britannica, helping usher in the online Encyclopedia’s golden age.

James Surowiecki, The Wisdom of Crowds (2004). An early book about Web 2.0 and crowdsourcing; explores some of the psychological theories behind Wikipedia.

2000

E. D. Hirsch, “You Can Always Look It Up. Or Can You?” (closing address to The Ninth Annual Core Knowledge Conference in Anaheim, CA, March 2000). This isn’t about Wikipedia, per se (the site wasn’t founded until 2001), but it’s an interesting background.